London ‘needs TB sanatoria’
The head of Britain’s TB unit has called for the return of old-fashioned TB isolation sanatoria as rates of the disease reach a 10-year high. Professor Francis Drobniewski said there were 6,838 new cases in England and Wales last year and more than 3,000 of these were in London. The big TB rise in the capital, and particularly in the borough of Newham, is in poverty stricken areas, he said, and there have been many new cases of the multi-drug resistant form of the disease and a small minority of patients who are refusing treatment and infecting others. “We may need to have a way of detaining them in a similar way to the Mental Health Act,” Professor Drobniewski said.
Disability work rights extended
The government is extending the degree of protection to disabled employees under the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) by including organisations that employ less than 15 people. But disability campaigners say the move doesn’t go far enough. Allan Anderson, operations manager at Positive Futures, said: “We welcome the move but the Act still only considers HIV as a disability when someone is symptomatic. It needs to be further extended to cover HIV from point of diagnosis, and we still have work to do to ensure this happens.”